Microship manufacturing should not require TFlops

In order to get TFlops, you need servers, in order to get servers, you need microships. In order to get microships, you need TFlops. This is a circular dependency that should not exist.
I also suggest you write a unit test that checks for circular dependencies in recipes.

This is intended. You're a CAPTAIN of industry. You're supposed to bootstrap production using your ship.

You find the first microchips by exploring or trading. Pretty sure this is by design, as it's hard to miss.
Unless you're talking about very very small ships, which don't exist.

once you get your gold smelting online, you can also quick trade gold for microchips. The way I built my microchip production up was through quick trades to get 3 machines building microchips in a repeating loop. This allows you to separate the imports to one machine doing plastic and copper, another doing gold, and the third doing acid. After letting that process run for a while, I upgraded it to 12 machines producing 12 chips per minute. Then finally, I built a mega facility with 144 machines which has allowed me to use a ton more robotic assemblers.